1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for data communications with reduced latency.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern parallel computers can include a plurality of nodes that communicate with each other via messages. In order to reduce to reduce the latency of such messages, different techniques have been used, each of which has various drawbacks. For example, a temporary buffer may be allocated to pack source buffers into a single contiguous buffer with messages for transmission. This technique, however, requires non-blocking callback in order to deallocate the temporary buffer. Alternatively, multiple source buffers may be packed into shadow buffers. This technique, however, requires separate buffers, resulting in poor memory efficiency and excessive memory allocation.